The only place on the internet where a real piano plays your midi files (live sometimes).
Upload a midi file to be played:
2026-06-15 Piano has changed from "live" mode to "batch" mode. Thank you to the 88 people who submitted 350+ songs and 15 hours of music which were played live over the last 5 days! For the rest of you, newly uploaded songs will need to wait for the next batch, which are most likely to run on weekends.
Yes. I have a player piano that's been around all my life, which doesn't play. Restoring it to the original 1920's spec requires repairing about 150 pneumatic elements made from rubber, leather, wood, and felt. I have more of a skill for electronics than woodworking, so I added a bunch of solenoids inside instead (yes, I am aware of the commercial versions of the same). Which means not only can it play, but it can play anything. Don't worry, the conversion is done such that the original player can still be restored in the future.
See my video about how I did it here.
I got the motivation after messing with some self playing christmas bells early in the year.
This site comes in the same vein as my online Big Mouth Billy Bass, in that once you finish a project like this, it tends to sit around as you move on to other projects. It is far more fun to put it up on the internet and let other people play with it.
You upload a MIDI file above, and it gets rendered into a simpler format that my piano understands.
MIDI channel 10 (the percussion track) is ignored. Otherwise, all notes on all channels are mixed to their corresponding position on the piano keyboard. Notes outside the range [21, 108] are ignored since they are not present on the 88-key piano. The sustain pedal is also not currently handled.
Assuming the rendering went well and your submission did not get rejected, your song will appear in the list as "pending". Now, you just need to wait for the piano to play it (see below).
If it does get rejected, it's probably because you were trying to play something that has too many notes at once (limit 22), is too long (10 minutes), or plays notes too fast. If it is rejected for "invalid characters", try to rename the file so the filename only contains letters A-Z. Also, exact duplicates of files that have been played already are rejected to reduce spam, but you can easily modify the file in a midi editor or something to make it non-identical if you really want to play it.
Once it does get played, the piano will record the performance, then upload it here. If everything goes right, the status on the list will change to a link to the MP3.
New (2026-06-20) - now lossless FLAC files are available for recently played songs! All you have to do is change the "mp3" in your download URL to "flac". So if yours is
https://piano.alnwlsn.com/mp3/A9Asv0U4nv.mp3
you would change it to
https://piano.alnwlsn.com/flac/A9Asv0U4nv.flac
I can't promise it will sound any better as my recording setup is mostly determined by which cheap microphone I could get and place in a convenient location, but there ya go.
All MIDI files will be kept private except for the original filename. However, all recorded performances will be publicly accessible MP3s.
Except for the times the piano is in "live" mode, submissions will queue here on this site until I can play them. I am somewhat limited in the amount of quiet recording time I get since this piano is located inside an ordinary residence, where functions other than recording piano performances for internet people often take priority. It may take some time (days? weeks?) but rest assured that if your submission passes the rendering tests and is listed as status "pending", it WILL be played and recoded at some point.
Batches are most likely to play on weekends.
Some of my other projects are live all the time, like the singing fish or my thermal printer, so check those out in the meantime.
The list of files is actually not a queue but a pool - all pending songs will be pulled randomly, regardless of the order in which they were uploaded, until the list of pending songs is empty.
Instead of recording a song in a waveform, MIDI files store a sequence of the notes and timing between them, and which instruments play at which time. It is essentially the digital successor of a piano roll.
In the days before computers could do digitized audio, this was a common way to have music, which played on your computers' soundcard, which contains a tiny electronic synthesizer.
The internet is full of MIDI files, some of which can date to the 90's early internet. It may be possible to find a MIDI file of whatever song you want to play by searching "[song name] MIDI". Many musicians use them to compose music even today, and there are sites like Online Sequencer where you can make your own. Whether or not they will sound any good played on a piano is another question.
If you're looking for something that might play specifically on a piano, look no further than this archive of thousands of scanned piano rolls. These were originally intended to play on a machine like mine. Over 9,000 of them on that site are so old that they are public domain, and are freely downloadable.
It is. This is just for fun, man.
Though, in keeping with the aesthetic of old-timey pianos, I feel as though you should be charged one shiny nickel per play. You can mail me one if you like, at [no_address_provided].
Otherwise, you are more than welcome to donate.
Send an email to piano@alnwlsn.com
Or, leave a comment under my video on youtube. For some reason I have a better chance of seeing those.